Crafting a Greenprint: Developing National Transition Plans

Meeting the climate goals of the Paris Agreement demanded comprehensive transition plans from nations globally.

Meeting the climate goals of the Paris Agreement demanded comprehensive transition plans from nations globally. With the next Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) due in 2025, we explored the core elements of successful plans and examined how investors can shape these strategies to unlock pathways to a sustainable future.

Steven Lizars (1)

STEVEN LIZARS

Partner, Sustainable Finance, Deloitte

Steven leads on Banking & Capital Markets in the Sustainable Finance business at Deloitte in the UK. He has a particular focus on how banks operationalise sustainability as the sector seeks to align decision-making and activities around net zero commitments.

He has advised several of the UK’s leading banks on transition planning and recent engagements have included sustainability disclosure requirements, strategy and operating model. Steven was also a member of the Expert Group advising on the UK Government Transition Finance Market Review.

Steven worked in Investment Banking for nearly 30 years in a variety of client-facing and leadership roles. His responsibilities have spanned a broad range of advisory businesses, expert content teams and financial structuring roles on both the private and public side. He held divisional responsibilities for Sustainable Finance at a leading UK bank and was a member of the banks’ Climate Executive Steering Group which oversaw strategy development and the embedding of the climate risk agenda.

Immediately prior to joining Deloitte, Steven worked at the Sustainable Markets Initiative, established by His Majesty the King in 2020, where he was responsible for several initiatives announced and launched at COP26. Steven is a trustee and board member of the Soil Association.

Sophie Fry

SOPHIE FRY

Head of ESG Policy Development, Barclays

Sophie Fry is Head of ESG Policy Development at Barclays, where she drives thought leadership engagement on the public policy approaches needed to support the net zero transition. Her work to date has included projects on supporting growth-stage climate tech, delivering the UK’s biodiversity net gain scheme, transition finance, and scaling private finance for clean hydrogen. Sophie was also a member of the Secretariat for the UK’s Transition Finance Market Review.

Sophie previously worked for HM Treasury, where she was Private Secretary to the Economic Secretary and City Minister. She also served as a senior policy adviser in the Treasury’s Financial Services Group, working on Brexit financial services negotiations and equivalence policy. Her work on sustainable finance has included supporting the One Planet Sovereign Wealth Funds Group on the increased mobilization of sovereign wealth fund capital toward the implementation of the Paris Agreement, and co-authoring research on carbon biases in financial regulation at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford University.

Sophie has a degree in Government from Harvard University, and a Master’s in Public Policy (MPP) and a Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Oxford.

Camilla Born

CAMILLA BORN, MBE

Senior Climate Advisor

Camilla is a leading climate advocate advising governments, international institutions, business, NGOs and philanthropies. She was a Senior Advisor to the COP26 and COP28 Presidents, also leading the development of the COP26 strategy and the UK Cabinet Office’s International Climate Finance team. Previously, she worked at the UK Department on International Development on climate adaptation and resilience and at E3G she focused on climate diplomacy, risk and security. She also advised the Swedish government on Climate Security with the Stockholm Peace and Research Institute. Camilla is a member of the RAPID board which brokers large-scale infrastructure investment in the UK water sector.

Josue Tanaka

JOSUÉ TANAKA

Principal Finance Advisor, C40 Cities

Josué has been working on development, environmental and urban finance for 40 years starting in Brazil and then at the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). He is the founding leader of the EBRD climate finance initiative leading under his tenure to cumulative EBRD green finance reaching over USD 42 billion in close to 2,000 climate change mitigation and adaptation projects. He has recently worked with the Brazilian G20 Presidency in the context of the Sustainable Finance Working Group. Josué holds a PhD and MSc from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BSE from Princeton University.

Naseer Chia

NASEER CHIA

Director, Nature and Sustainable Finance, Systemiq

Naseer Chia is a Director in Systemiq’s Nature and Sustainable Finance practices, working at the intersection of nature policy, finance and data. He currently leads our work on SPACES, a coalition supporting governments to develop and implement national, spatially-determined transition plans that deliver on integrated climate and nature targets, and ‘Nature on the Balance Sheet’, an initiative with the Capitals Coalition and LandBanking Group aiming to mobilise capital for nature by properly recognizing its value. He has published several papers, including ‘Financing Nature’ in partnership with the Center for Global Commons, which sets out a transformative action agenda for mobilising large-scale finance into nature. He has previously worked with a range of the world’s largest multi-national corporations on developing global sustainability strategies, incubating new business models in East and West Africa, and has recently advised a mission-focused philanthropy on its climate adaptation strategy. He is a qualified lawyer by background, graduated in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Oxford University, and completed an MSc in Global Governance and Ethics at University College London.

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